Sprucing up the Joint

Every now and then you need to toss a new coat of paint on the place. It’s no different with blogs. They can get stale after awhile and need a bit of updating. I figured that a ten-year anniversary was as good a time as any to change things up here.

I’ve switched over to the Meadow Hill template for WordPress by Tomas Toman. It’s a flexible format that looks great whether your accessing the site from a desktop or mobile device. I’ve also added a whole bunch of background header images that rotate randomly upon reload.

The side widgets are still there, but don’t appear until you click on one of the “Read More” buttons to view the entire article. Then you’ll see the “Recent Visitors”, “Recent Tweets”, the search box, and any other goodies.

I had a couple of requirements for the new appearance. First, the fonts needed to be more adjustable and have a bit more space than my old theme. The site was hard to read. I probably could have gone into the CSS for the site and changed it myself, but why bother. This one has about the same size font, but is double-spaced for easier reading. I may bump up the font size at some time.

Secondly, the site needed to be able to display lead images without those hateful “Featured Images” that WordPress uses. The latest version of WordPress did allow designation of a featured image by URL, but to get it to work with Flickr required too many hoops.

So, this is what we have now. I think I’ll live with it for awhile and see if I like it. If you follow the site via RSS feed or some other reader you probably won’t see any difference. However, if you actually visit the site you’ll spot the new look right away.